Optimizing external contacts
Innovation can originate from anywhere in the corporation. In some cases internal innovators reach out to other companies for collaboration and access to skills or technologies.
As a global Innovation Leader of course I encouraged this practice. In many cases, these collaborations resulted in new ways of looking at our business/customer problems and generated innovative solutions. For example: application of emerging technologies that had not yet been used in our corporation, like AI, robotics and drones.
However, as the number of innovators within our corporation grew exponentially, the following often happened. An innovator in a certain geography worked with a certain external company from that same location. In parallel, a similar collaboration between the same 2 companies was happening in other locations across the globe. Nobody in the 2 companies was aware of all these collaborations.
This lack of awareness lead to some complications: duplication of a similar innovation multiplied the cost and learnings were not shared. In addition, there was a risk that the technology that was being pursued wouldn’t fit in the platforms our corporation had decided on or that the new technology wouldn’t be allowed on our existing platforms, e.g. from a competitive/contractual point of view.
We created a solution to anticipate these complications, without discouraging passionate innovators with cumbersome processes:
- we identified the major multinational companies multiple innovators in our corporations were collaborating with, like Amazon, Phillips, IBM, Twitter;
- we assigned one person in the corporation as the Strategic Account Liaison (SAL) for each of those external companies;
- all Innovation Leaders in the corporation were asked to inform the respective SAL about any innovators in their geography that were actively engaged with those companies or that planned to do so.
The SAL could be anywhere in the corporation: it could be someone who already had a relationship with the external company he/she was assigned to or it could be someone working in the most logical functional area, e.g. the Amazon SAL might be an IT person.
The SAL was responsible to compile all engagements with the assigned company. The SAL’s objective was not to approve or reject those engagements, but to ensure awareness and share learnings with all internal innovators that engaged or planned to engage with that company. Learnings were broadly defined and included project specific, cultural and financial intelligence. These learnings could be shared by email or via regular conference calls with all engaged innovators (or their Innovation Leaders).
This approach was very simple, practical and created only limited new processes. It could easily be started when engagements with a new company were identified or stopped when it was no longer deemed relevant. This approach increased visibility across the corporation of most engagements with each major company, helping innovators with the experiences other colleagues had with that company.
When appropriate, the SAL would define a global engagement or collaboration strategy, such as when several collaborations in multiple countries led to successful innovations.
In some cases, recommendations against further engagement were issued after consistent negative experiences, such as lack of commitment from the company shown during multiple engagements in different countries.
As Michelangelo said:
“I am still learning.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I championed this “engagement SAL” concept through continued promotion to my Leadership, Country/Regional Innovation Leaders and innovators and by sharing/recognizing examples and successes.
More about this topic: Health Technology: the merging disciplines of medicine and innovation, by Robin Robinson
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